Ofcom entry ‘a bit boring’ says author

That Ofcom entry was a bit boring wasn’t it? Even by my standards. Two or three people have told me they actually fell asleep while reading it – one while driving a school bus at speed in heavy traffic. So I feel obliged to come back and provide a pithier summary. I think it’s like this:

Almost everyone in new media and broadcast wants a new public service commissioning vehicle called the PSP to start funneling license fee money into new interactive content.

There’s no good argument for the PSP because the conditions that produced the original public service media settlement no longer exist.

Ofcom is obliged to take into account the interests of all relevant stakeholders in producing recommendations. Consequently it’s going to be very hard for Ofcom to say ‘no’ to the PSP (although there’ll be some cheese-paring for sure).

So we’ll probably get one anyway.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that’s probably a pretty good thing. But we should take a bit of time to decide why, in a post-scarcity, post-Reith, post-Internet world we should subsidise the creation of content and services in the absence of classical market failure.